"playbrains" Posts

If you could ask the candy that you eat what its lifelong goals are, what would it say? Would it tell you that it wants to be an astronaut? Drive in the Indy 500? Run a marathon? Probably not. If you asked a Sour Patch Kid that question, the answer would be this: To make it to the human belly, their sweet rapture.

And that, my friends, is the premise of our new video game World Gone Sour starring the sweet-then-sour candy, Sour Patch Kids. We took that premise, added Creed Bratton from NBC’s “The Office” as our “sometimes sweet and sometimes sour” narrator, got Wu-Tang’s own Method Man to create a custom song included in the game, and set out to make a ridiculously fun game for you to enjoy.

World Gone Sour is a puzzle platformer made by the incredibly talented team at Playbrains (makers of the PSN-exclusive game Sideway where you play as an inch-high candy in a twisted miniature world where you play through sticky movie theatre floors, across sizzling hamburger grills, through a psychotic doll house, and over razor sharp buzz saws.

In Hollywood circles, there is a well-known tradition where Steven Spielberg and George Lucas will skip town and go somewhere remote right about when they have a big movie opening. They do this mostly for good luck, but also to avoid the press and ignore the grosses. Basically, they generally try to get their mind off of the project they’ve dedicated much of their recent lives to create.

I mention this because our adventure platformer Sideway: New York is all wrapped and done and will be available only on PSN as of today’s PlayStation Store update. I also mention this because at this moment, a few of us here at the studio are out in Zimbabwe embarking on a new work project. (Oooh, I can just see the screaming blog headlines now: “Game Developer compares his game to Star Wars”).

Sony Online Entertainment is really making its mark on PSN this fall. Rolling out alongside the excellent Rochard and the highly-anticipated PAYDAY: The Heist, Sideway: New York brings an impressive visual flourish to 2D platformers. Painted protagonist Nox keeps switching planes in 3D as he hugs the walls and jumps from building to building. Take a look at the trailer.

At last week’s Fantastic Fest in Austin, I caught up with Scott Simpson, director of Canadian developing studio Playbrains (and blog comment-reply record holder with a 100% reply rate!). While he’s answered most of the questions out there, Sideway still holds few more details yet to be revealed, including bite-sized, intra-level time trials to earn collectables and “birds that poop bombs.” I recorded our conversation as we played through some of the game’s early levels.

Oh dear, sweet PlayStation.Blog, how I have missed you. When we were last snuggling under the covers in the fall, I was announcing Sideway, our upcoming action platformer based on the in-development cartoon series from the wonderfully twisted minds at Fuel Entertainment. I then spent hours (which turned into days) hanging out in the comments section, waiting for somebody to ask me about my dogs or that time I met Kris Kristofferson.

Greetings PlayStation.Blog! I’m the studio director of Playbrains, and I’m here today to announce the awesomesauce that is Sideway, a unique adventure platformer set in and around the oh-so-gritty streets of New York City. The characters and story have been birthed from a fantastic world created by the quasi-evil geniuses at Fuel Industries and W!ldbrain. […]